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K Menus—Day 61© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I have been twiddlin’ and fiddlin’ with the KDE “K” menus. Browse various discussion groups and one will discover the general consensus that the menus are not well designed. A lot of clutter. Part of the challenge with designing good menus is the overwhelming number of programs and tools provided within the KDE environment. I don’t envy the KDE designers in deriving new menus for future releases. I think they are doing well with how they structured the main level, but they should reconsider how they have structured the secondary levels. I think they can resolve part of the problem by reordering menu selections into similar tasks and then more liberally use separation bars. My goal is to create a task-oriented menu structure. This is the approach I am taking as my K menus slowly evolve to my preferences. I have made some progress. In all but the Utilities menu I have eliminated the “More Applications sub menu and merged those elements with the parent menu. That helped me. For now the Utilities menu remains as is only because there are so many items. I have to think about how to rearrange that menu. However, I moved and rearranged several menu items. For example, WINE creates some menu entries. I originally renamed that menu option from WINE to Windows, but with my recent effort I moved those items to the Office menu and deleted the WINE/Windows menu option. I moved the Toys menu to the Games menu as a sub menu. After I enabled the Preferences menu option in the Panel applet, I decided half of the Settings menu options were no longer necessary. I then moved the remaining Settings menu options to my System menu. I probably do not need the Preferences menu either because I know my way around the KDE Control Center and I have a single menu option for that. Still, I’ll keep the Preferences option for a while. If I never use that menu I’ll later disable. Part of the reason I am playing with the K menu structure is eventually I want to migrate some of my Windows Start menu options. Through the years I have customized my menu and I long ago discarded the original layout provided by Mr. Gates. Again, I don’t envy developers who must design these kinds of menus. Some presumptions are necessary and for new users to find tools the menus must err on the side of bloat rather than lean. Nonetheless, there are several menu items I want to migrate and this exercise is requiring me to think about these issues. I do not structure my Start menus by program but by the nature of the task. For example, I maintain a Start menu option called Lists. Some of those lists are mere text files, some are Word files, some are simple Excel spreadsheets. I also maintain a menu option called Projects, where I have access to various files that I am continually working on. In this menu I keep links to various books, manuals, or other Word projects, as well as some Excel spreadsheets. Now that I can run Word in WINE, these menu options will help me in my Slackware environment too. Eventually I plan to convert my spreadsheets to OpenOffice Calc or KOffice because most of them are basic spreadsheets. However, one spreadsheet uses old Excel 5.0 macros that I never had the energy to convert to Visual Basic, and another uses some Add-Ins. I’m unsure what I’ll do with those spreadsheets except hope they both run fine under WINE. All of my raw text files are of little concern because any text editor works to manage those files. I have some HTML files and I can use Kate to help me maintain most of those. However, eventually I want to venture into Quanta Plus to maintain the relatively few HTML files I maintain. There are some Windows Start menu options that will never need migrating—and somewhat humorously too. I have a menu called Administrative Tools and there are several sub menus within that menu. One of the sub menus contains access to all of my registry tools. I won’t be needing them anymore! Likewise, I won’t need access to tool such as Norton Anti-Virus or Norton Tools, nor will I any longer need access to various spyware tools. Migrating other menu items is not necessary only because there already exists corresponding tools in KDE. The primary challenge is learning the KDE K menu structure to find those tools. Another challenge is finding time to learn how to use those equivalent tools. One area that I have mentioned previously that I have not yet tackled is a menu containing various batch files I regularly run. Most of these batch files are related to my backup strategy and before I can migrate those menu options to my K menu, I need to convert the scripts to bash. This is another reason I am hoping the VNC experiment succeeds because then I can continue running these batch files natively in NT rather than pressure myself to convert everything. I will one day convert the scripts, but everything that helps during the transition is simply a way to help maintain sanity. Rome wasn’t built in a day! Finis. |
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